Emulsion #2 - Goodbye ain't what it used to be

Today is my last day at Best Buy. I'm pretty much emotionally exhausted with the many, many goodbye conversations I've been having. And yet...what does goodbye mean nowadays?

I see tweets from my BBY friends all day long in Twitter. I've friended a bunch of them on Facebook. I have all of their contact info in Gmail and my iPhone. It will be easier for me to connect with all of them after I've left than it was to connect with people inside companies I worked at earlier in my career.

As recently as 1995, my wife and I went to Europe for three weeks with our then-4-year-old daughter. We traveled with a collapsible stroller and backpacks, took the Eurail from city to city. It was a fabulous trip. But in terms of staying connected with people, we may as well have gone to the moon. No email, no mobile phones; we left our itinerary with relatives, along with phone numbers to the hotels we planned to stay at, but our departure was pretty much: "See you in three weeks. If our house burns down, don't try to reach us...it'll just ruin our trip."

In a remarkably short time, staying connected has become not just easy, but part of us. We're not separate from the network of friends, social networking sites and internetworked technologies we're plugged into.

So goodbye really doesn't mean what it used to. I'll know as much on a daily basis about many of my BBY friends - what they're thinking about, working on, having for lunch - as I have while working there.

There really isn't a goodbye any more, until that final, permanent goodbye which comes (hopefully) much later. And who knows? Maybe that one isn't really the same either. In 30 or 40 or 50 years, when my physical self conks out, how much of "me" will remain in the cloud? All of my filters, auto-replies, bots, time-released postings...will they continue to run indefinitely? Will some ghostly remnant of me continue to haunt my friends and taunt would-be marketers? Heck, maybe some of the marketing will work with my shop-bots and what's left in my PayPal account.

I'll turn in my badge today, set up my auto-reply email, drop off all my gear, bag up the last of my stuff, and head out for whatever lies ahead. But I'm done saying goodbye...that old idea just doesn't work any more.

Emulsion #1 - Whisk Vigorously

An emulsion is mixture in which one liquid is dispersed in tiny droplets more or less evenly through another liquid. The most common are oil/water emulsions: butter, mayonnaise, salad dressing, hair-styling gel. One of the liquids, the dispersed phase, is distributed throughout the other, the continuous phase. In the case of salad dressing, vinegar is the dispersed phase, and oil is the continuous phase.

We all know oil and water don’t mix happily, so there are two requirements to form a stable emulsion. The first is an emulsifier (or emulgent). This is a substance with a molecular structure that enables it to bind on one end to the water, and on the other end to the oil. It stabilizes the emulsion. The second requirement is energy – something must break up the dispersed-phase liquid into droplets and mix it into the continuous phase liquid. The more energy applied, the tinier the droplets; the tinier the droplets, the more stable (typically) the emulsion.

What fascinates me about emulsions is that, when they’re really stable, they seem like a totally new substance (the oil-based and water-based elements of hair gel applied separately would not produce a pleasant result), yet both the continuous and dispersed phase liquids retain their original chemical structure when an emulsion is formed. There is no chemical reaction between the two. The emulgent retains its chemical structure as well. It is a binding agent, but does not chemically react with either liquid.

So. Why in the hell am I telling you all this?

I think emulsions are a great analog for how ideas large and small are formed and propagated, and how we as humans grow and develop. We are the sum of all our experiences, the people we’ve loved, the books we’ve read, the jobs we’ve had, the places we’ve lived and visited. All of these experiences remain, separate and intact, in our memories, yet they also combine in this fascinating way to make us who we are. Our thoughts and self-identities are this whirl of all the stuff we’ve taken in over the years of our lives.

Living purposefully is nothing more than vigorous whisking – it is the application of energy to add richness to our thinking and our experiences. In this blog I’ll be exploring mixtures of ideas I’m working on, stuff I’m fascinated by, experiences that have grabbed me in some way.

Life is short. Whisk vigorously!